The Seal of the Worm (46 page)

Laszlo met his eyes, unflinching. ‘You sound like Sten Maker.’ That was unfair. He knew Balkus and Sperra had gone to Maker to complain after the Sarnesh had virtually annexed Princep Salma, and they had been rebuffed. He himself had received the same treatment concerning Milus’s imprisonment of the woman he now proposed to rescue.

The Ant’s expression fell away, leaving Laszlo without clues.

‘It’s going to happen,’ the Fly told him. ‘If it happens, and Milus and Mar’Maker and the Wasps get to have their war, all the better. I think the Wasps deserve a kick in the parts, myself. I’ll lend a boot. But I will have her back, Balkus.’

At last those broad shoulders rose and fell, and Laszlo reckoned it was Sperra who made the difference, her support for him so against her own interest. The smile he sent her, the implicit encouragement, made a liar out of him.

‘Tell me what I can do,’ said Balkus. ‘No promises, though. I have my people to keep safe, and the Sarnesh wouldn’t need much excuse to put me in the next cell. But tell me what you need, and I’ll see.’

Thirty

The Slave Corps was busy.

Across the Empire, prison camps had sprung up at locations dictated by geographical convenience, the availability of transport or mere quartermasters’ fiat. They were hasty affairs, for the Empress’s orders had been unexpected, unprecedented.
Bring me slaves, Inapt for preference
. And in numbers, such very large numbers. But Seda’s writ was unyielding, and never before had the Slave Corps had such a chance to wield it.

They had started small. They had combed households and slave markets for Commonwealers left over from the Twelve-year War. They had bought Moths and Grasshoppers from the Scorpions – and not a few Inapt Scorpions as well. But the demand had just increased, the figures rising in leaps and sudden skips as Seda refined her calculations.

They had gone into Inapt communities within the Empire, such as the Grasshopper-kinden town of Sa, and simply levied a tax of bodies, a mass conscription of men, women and children. They brooked no argument, for they were drunk on vicarious power. They carried away trains of hundreds, even thousands.

They sent airships to the Principalities, those Commonweal states formerly under Imperial control and now close allies, offering to buy every slave they had, and the ships returned with full holds and set off again as soon as they had unloaded.

Then the conflict with the Spiderlands, which so many others had been decrying, began to pay dividends. A steady flow of prisoners from Seldis and points south became a flood, and the Slave Corps seized on them all, buying or trading or confiscating as the need arose.

And still the Empress demanded more.

At the last they began going to the gates of all the Auxillian cities, Inapt or not, and making their demands. They sent to the Lowlands. They sent to every compass point. The Empress demanded slaves and, while that demand existed, the Slave Corps – loathed and maligned by every other branch of the Imperial forces – was the most powerful force in the Empire.

But they let their enthusiasm to carry out her orders outstrip their ability. They had learned few lessons from the excesses of the Twelve-year War, when the influx of Commonweal slaves had been so overwhelming that almost one in five died of neglect and maltreatment before reaching the Empire. The Slave Corps continued amassing the terrible quantities of bodies that the Empress was demanding, but they would not be able to keep them long. They could not feed them. They could not safeguard them from pestilence. Already the deaths were beginning, choked and starved, plagued and crippled, killed by each other, killed by the brutality of their warders, dying by their own hands.

The senior Slave Corps officers were starting to exchange glances, writing urgently to Capitas to say,
We have so many now – but what next?
No response came save, occasionally, a Red Watch officer would arrive and remind them that it was not their place to question the Empress.

One such prison facility was within ten miles of Capitas. Slaves stripped from the capital itself had been sent there, but recently the place had become full to bursting with Spiders taken in the war, the overflow from other places already starting to go septic with overcrowding and lack of care.

The inmates were crammed almost shoulder to shoulder into wooden cages still rough with splinters. Whether a slave ate or not depended on the charity of those around them, since there was no way for the Wasps to ensure that food and water reached them all. Each morning there were a few more dead, and all too often the bodies could not be removed.

The place reeked of death, of excrement, of the sour reek of human desperation. The Slave Corps contingent there was constantly being rotated out because men had a tendency to desert rather than face what they found themselves contributing to, or else they began to consider un-Imperial ideas about mercy.

One evening there was a visitor.

The figure approached the gates with a swift stride, as confident as a general, although no Wasp-kinden ever looked as he did. The guards barring his way noted the armour of immaculate black and yellow in a style a thousand years old, ancient Mantis-kinden sentinel plate, a multitude of interlocking pieces, elegant and barbed, something from another time.

They could not quite see the face within the helm, even with the visor up. He was pale, they would say later, and he had surpassingly cold eyes.

‘I am from the Empress,’ he told them. ‘I am come for the slaves.’

He was a Mantis, and everyone knew how Mantids felt about slavery. The prison commander was sent for, a Major Vorken of the Slave Corps, a veteran of the Twelve-year War. The visitor waited patiently for him.

The major, as it happened, had been in the capital recently and had seen the Empress. He recognized the apparition before him as her bodyguard, but that raised more questions than it answered.

‘What are you here for, sir?’ The honorific was a wager: surely no Mantis outranked a major, but to omit it where it was due would doubtless incur harsher consequences than to award it unmerited.

‘I am come for the slaves.’ Again that cold voice, the intonation identical.

Vorken had been uneasy from the moment he set eyes on this man. Now real alarm was rising up within him. ‘The prisoners here are being held by Her Majesty’s own order. I cannot countenance any attempt to release or move them without her written instruction.’ And surely she would send her unloved Red Watch with such orders, anyway, and not this freakish figure from a history book.

‘I am come for the slaves.’ Again. ‘Do not attempt to impede me.’

The figure was past the gate before the guards could react, the major stumbling frantically back to keep out of the intruder’s reach. It was a terrible moment of choice. If the man was the servant of the Empress and acting in that capacity, then any action taken against him was nothing short of treason – crossed pikes for sure. If he had broken from his mistress, though, then letting him meddle with the slaves – perhaps creating some great slave army within march of Capitas itself – would be a betrayal of both the Empire and the corps itself.

Vorken made his call. ‘Stop him! Bring him down! Alive if you can!’

The Mantis turned as a score of slavers descended upon him, noted their stings and snapbows, and then continued towards the nearest cage door.

‘Bring him down!’ the major shouted again, furiously.

Stingshot crackled, boiling off that antique armour without marking it and, though the odd snapbow bolt penetrated, the occupant seemed barely to notice, as though what was inside it was proof against mere steel darts, no matter how vigorously they were thrown.

The helm turned back towards them, and Major Vorken was sure that he saw some spark of disappointment in the way the Mantis held himself.

Then he was moving amongst the men who had attacked him, without seeming to clear the distance in between, cutting them down – cutting them
apart
– with ruthless efficiency even as they realized they were being attacked. A half-dozen were dead in that first wave of blows, and the rest were scattering, shooting back at nothing, wounding only their comrades.

He hunted them down. It was swifter than Vorken would have thought possible. He stalked shadow to shadow, and Vorken lost track of him almost immediately, then located him again with each cry and scream as the man danced through the city of cages before the staring, starved eyes of the slaves.

Then silence. A minute had passed, or perhaps even less.

Vorken took a deep breath. His life had been fraying at the edges since he had realized that the prison camp could simply not continue to support itself any more, that his orders had carried within them the seeds of their own destruction. Now this man had arrived and seemed to be simply the embodiment of the disaster he had known was coming.

Vorken turned slowly and, of course, the figure was there. Its blade, one of those Mantis claws that folded back against the arm, was barely bloody.

‘I am come for the slaves.’ Pale lips moving, the tone unchanged, as though a score of Vorken’s men were not now dead.

‘Take them.’ Waiting for the death strike.

It did not come. The Mantis had lost interest in him. Instead, he strode to the nearest cage – crammed with two score Spiders in a space where the major would normally have kept a dozen slaves at most.

The blade flashed again, and abruptly the wooden grille of the door was sagging open.

Empress, forgive me
, Vorken thought – although he knew she was not the forgiving type.

Then the Mantis went to work. Not to free the slaves. Of course not. Mantids despised slaves as much as they did slavers, it seemed, and despised Spiders more than anyone. But even that could not account for what Vorken was watching. This was not hatred, that most enduring of human traits. This was something beyond the experience of a Slave Corps major, an order of magnitude beyond anything he himself had ever done or ordered.

The Mantis moved on to the next cage. By now the slaves – quicker on the uptake than their masters, perhaps – had begun to shout and cry out for help. Vorken and his surviving men stood silent and paralysed. Help was something they had already tried to offer, although they had not realized that was what they had been doing.

Cage by cage, he was killing them. He was killing all of them, as coldly and methodically as a machine. There were thousands of slaves crammed into Vorken’s camp, of all ages, of all kinden, soldiers and civilians both. The Mantis was making no distinction.

After the man had made an abattoir of the third cage, something snapped within Vorken and he moved to intervene. It took a single glance of those freezing eyes to stop him in his tracks. That lone moment when he might force himself to do something passed in deadly silence, then he stepped back.

The hysterical shrieking extended across the whole camp now, a cacophony of human fear and dread producing a composite sound Vorken had never heard before. It almost seemed that his Inapt charges were finding a horror in what was going on that went beyond mere inescapable death.

Vorken knew other Slave Corps officers, and many of the other camp commanders. He gritted his teeth and, hunching his shoulders against the unbearable sounds of massacre, began writing them messages as swiftly as his shaking hands could manage the pen.

Lieutenant-Auxillian Gannic, engineer and saboteur, had expected to be debriefed long before this. After returning from the Exalsee expedition, he had anticipated punishment, or at the very least being sidelined on to some low-priority job. The death of Dariandrephos, whilst anticipated as a possibility, had not been quite the result that had been expected from him.

Instead of a reprimand, he had merely received curt orders from General Lien that sent him off to Helleron and Sonn, where the chemical manufactories were already producing the noxious Bee-killer. Having been kept waiting for Gannic’s recovery of the formula, they were now churning it out as fast as could be.

Gannic understood the tactical uses for the stuff – a canister smuggled into an enemy camp, say, or thrown in amidst an army by catapult. Beyond that, somewhere his mind was somewhat loath to go, he was aware of the greater potential – indeed the original test that had been envisaged. Get enough of the stuff together and you could smother a city.

They had a great deal of the Bee-killer by now, and those factories were still working at full tilt.

He had travelled there under the command of a Red Watch captain who had barely looked at him and certainly not disclosed his name. Gannic had heard plenty about the Red Watch, and this man had confirmed all of that: hostile, quick to criticize, never explaining himself, his orders vacillating between patronizing and insufficient.
Perfect officer material therefore.

Back in Capitas again, with their cargo of death, he was summoned to Lien immediately to account for himself.

The Engineering Corps’ only general looked as if he could use a little more sleep, Gannic decided. He braced himself for a tongue-lashing because he had failed to accomplish the Chasme mission perfectly – or even particularly well – and because he was a halfbreed, and therefore paradoxically, whilst less was expected of him, any failure was deemed all the more blameworthy.

Instead, Lien just scowled. ‘Report,’ he barked. And when Gannic tried to tell him about Chasme and the Exalsee he waved it away.

‘I’ve read about that. Report on the Bee-killer.’

Gannic’s unease changed direction and he spent a careful twenty minutes setting out the quantities of the chemical amassed, rates of production, logistics of transport. When he had finished, Lien remained silent, not even glancing at him. The lean, bald general seemed to be staring into some future that the man didn’t like overmuch.

This is where I get slapped down.
Indeed, Gannic pressed the question, because a flat reprimand to put him in his place would at least restore his faith in the machinery of Empire. After all, at least he would
know
his place then, however hard he was returned to it.